Experts suggest that the existence of many businesses in the next millennium will in large part depend on their ability to tap into and share information on the Information Superhighway. Whether this is in the form of subscribing to an online internet service or having networked communications intraoffice or interstate, the Information Superhighway is imperative to a business's growth and ability to compete in the marketplace. Recognition of this phenomenon has become commonplace. For small operations, a few or several PC's, a server, and one or more printers linked by a LAN, or local area network, suffices. On a larger scale, there may be an infinite number of PC's, many servers, many printers, and connections made up of both LAN's and WAN's, or wide area networks. Whatever configuration of componentry is utilized, the infrastructure for maintaining such a system can become increasingly complex as an operation expands and more devices are added to the system.
In response to these issues, software developers have manufactured a variety of applications designed to manage an information system. Of particular interest are system diagnostics applications that compile health information about a system, such as how much memory is being used and how much disk space is available.
The basic architecture and process of compiling diagnostic information in an existing system diagnostics application includes:
A management console, or a machine that displays the diagnostics information. PA1 A managed node machine, or a machine that contains the component(s) for which diagnostic information is being sought. PA1 A control engine that dispatches a request for diagnostic information. PA1 An expression engine that processes the request and returns a response to the management console.
The control and expression engines reside on the management console. When a request is made from the management console, the control engine dispatches this request to the expression engine. The expression engine evaluates this request to determine what managed node machine to obtain the diagnostic information from and then dispatches the same request to the managed node machine. Some process on the managed node machine retrieves the requested data and sends a response back to the expression engine on the management console. The expression engine processes the data and sends the response back to the control engine for display.
While this framework works well in a localized environment, it poses a menace to efficient traffic management in a distributed environment where the managed node machine can be physically located thousands of miles away from the management console. For one, since both engines reside on the management console, a request and a response are transmitted over the network each time the managed node machine is polled for data. Secondly, this "data pull" method causes the control engine to constantly poll for data from the managed node machine, even though data may not have changed. In all scenarios, system resources are unnecessarily consumed, particularly where data has not changed. There is a need, therefore, for a method and system that will efficiently manage compiling diagnostic information such as to alleviate unnecessary consumption of system resources and communication links.